Jerry Douglas

Please be patient. Jerry Douglas will be along shortly. He’s just backstage, signing a few copies of his new CD, “Glide.”

A man walks into a diner. He looks familiar with the place but still a little lonely and detached. He sits down and orders, and as he waits he becomes aware of the voices of the other customers. He listens to those voices, and his expression changes from detachment to attentiveness. The meanings of the words he overhears dwindle away, and the man begins to discern in them instead nonverbal tones and patterns. Phrasing, counterpoint, arpeggios, voices as “instruments” with distinctive qualities. Finally, for the man who is sitting there alone, the diner’s babble is transformed into a kind of music. He smiles.

The man is actor Colm Feore, portraying the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, in one of the short films from the movie “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.” This quirky, montage-like Canadian work, made in 1993, was not a huge commercial success, but it did win some prestigious awards and has a cult following to this day. It was based, at least numerically, on Bach’s marvelous piano composition “The Goldberg Variations”—of which there are—uh, thirty-two.

Jerry Douglas is doing some deep-breathing exercises prior to his appearance. That rhythmic clapping from the balcony doesn’t help. If you think this preamble is pretentious, it might be good to remember that “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould” was parodied as “Twenty Two Short Films About Springfield” by “The Simpsons.”

The diner scene from this movie shows a great musician allowing himself—almost willing himself—to hear spoken language a) pre-verbally, as if he were a baby and didn’t know what words mean, even what they are, and b) hearing it as if it were simply notes—notes in which, taken together, because he is in fact a brilliant artist, he discovers a sort of spontaneous, improvised musical composition. He responds to what he hears in a very primal, almost infantile way and then with his adult genius imposes order and feeling upon it.

Jerry Douglas is now checking to make sure that his shirt is not tucked in. He’ll be here any second. Please quit the stomping.

This movie’s “Concerto for Ten or Fifteen Unrelated Diner Voices and Clinking Silverware,” as one might think of it, conveys not only child-like auditory experience and the creative mind at work but also humor and authority--and an example of a huge talent for drawing inspiration from many different sources and synthesizing them. That’s JD’s cue, and here he is at last. You may applaud.

Jerry Douglas, who stands center stage before you now in the form of this new, masterful, and wide-ranging album, started his professional career when he was sixteen, the son of a steelworker, living in Warren, Ohio, and playing his instrument of choice, the Dobro, in bars. He has--like Glenn Gould as portrayed in the Concerto Diner--absorbed the sights and sounds around him and transmuted them into his own unique art by developing an eclectic style of playing and composing for the Dobro and other subspecies of resonator and slide guitars. His most clearly audible source is bluegrass—the genre in which he started and over which, if you ask me, he now presides. He has also conscripted and deployed: jazz, with its imperative to improvise; the raw emotion and twang of country music; the plaintive ragas of Indian sitars; Native American modal melodies; the sonata-allegro structures of classical music; Hawaiian music, with its sunny harmonies and marine swells; the note-packed virtuosities of Celtic tunes; woebegone New Orleans funeral marches; Dixieland’s brassiness; gospel; and the blues. In a word or three, just about everything. You will also find folded into Douglas’s music a great many other ingredients, among them rain, children’s games, rivers, and a large amount of weeping—to say nothing of hogs, the war in Iraq, locomotives, confetti, bourbon, machine guns, and the entire cosmos.

For all this variegation of influences and interests, two constants pervade Douglas’s performances and compositions, and they are, as he has said in a recent conversation, “in some tension.” These creatively conflicting constants underlie all of the arts; one is discipline and the other is playfulness. “I always try to stay loose when I perform and when I record,” he says, “but I always worry that if I get too far away from the main idea, the whole thing will fall apart.” He wants his audience to embrace this paradox as well. “I want the music I play to be challenging, but I don’t want it to sound that way.” We start “messing around” randomly when we’re young children, and in many ways to grow up is to become more orderly, but in the course of that process we often tend to lose the delight of messing around. Successful art—and, in particular, music of any real texture—picks up what’s lying around, musically and otherwise, and creates designs from it (again like Glenn Gould in the Lyric Café) and then leads us back through and by means of formal design to a kind of exalted play, in which order is at once questioned and maintained. It’s no accident that the same simple verb applies to musical instruments and to games.

You can think of Jerry Douglas’s artistic development, from his earliest, pure-bluegrass days to this newest CD as a continuing maturation—an ever-increasing instrumental mastery, a broadening of scope, a wider range of emotion, an expanding openness and generosity. He just keeps growing up. The origins of the pieces on “Glide” show all these qualities. In his own composition “Sway,” for example, you can hear the bereft sound of a Bourbon Street funeral procession interrupted by an upbeat Dixieland interlude—as those marches often are. “I wanted the slow section to sound as if it was about to fall apart,” he says with a laugh—“to be on the edge of breaking down. Katrina is in there somewhere. Then the faster section is defiant and joyful.” Douglas wrote “Trouble On Alum”—a Scottish-sounding jig bookended by a more serene melody, to illustrate the river painting of William Matthews, the American artist of nature and the West. (Alum is the name of a creek in West Virginia.) When asked about the whirlwind-fast, downward-spiraling Dobro licks in the up-tempo part, Douglas says, laughing again, “They’re like signatures. They’re like signing my name with some flourishes.”

The laughter interspersing these quotes is perhaps more nearly the point of citing them than the quotes themselves. For Douglas has great fun with his music. He says, “I enjoy what I’m doing so much that after performing I sometimes say to myself, ‘I’m getting paid for that?’” His laughter and pleasure recall the smile on the face of Glenn Gould in that diner, and the people who join in this fun with Douglas are similarly playful and accomplished—Douglas’s talented band and guests like his friend Edgar Meyer, the great bass player; Sam Bush, mandolinista supreme; Travis Tritt, the rough-and-tumble, truck-driver-voiced country singer with a surprisingly pretty falsetto; banjo pioneer/giant Earl Scruggs, about whom, simply, the more said the better; and Rodney Crowell, one of our best singer/songwriters. The whole recording at first seems like a cross between a jam session and something stricter—a recital. But if you consider the sense of play and the musical authority that, with a tributary of social consciousness, run beneath the songs here like powerful underground watercourses, you’ll understand that it’s not only wonderfully complex but also clearly of a piece.

Oh yes—and not only global but also profoundly American.

So press that button and strike up the band!

-Daniel Menaker

www.jerrydouglas.com